At 3:30 AM this morning I get the dreaded phone call from a girl at the sheriff’s department asking if I am John XXX. So immediately all those thoughts go racing around in my head like “who was killed, who did I buzz last, etc?”

She says only, “we have a deputy waiting for you at your airstrip.” I look out and see at least two sets of flashing lights. “Sh#t!”

A few minutes later the deputy is introducing me to a highway patrol guy and someone from civil air patrol. It was an ELT going off. He said it was coming from Bushy’s hangar, but I told him that I had just landed at dusk, so we checked my planes first. They were ok.

In Bushy’s hangar his champ is chirping big time. The guy said he must have had a hard landing. I said he is rusty, so maybe, yes?

They said an airliner reported the 121.5 call at 12:30 AM. They launched a search aircraft from Columbus (60 miles west of me), but they couldn’t land at a grass strip, so they had a trouper and a CAP from New Philadelphia (60 miles NE of me) drive down.

Moral of the story, if you can hang in there for 3 hours after the crash, you might be saved.

Thanks for sharing that. I fly for the airlines and report ELT's to ATC several times a month. I never thought that anyone actually did anything about those reports.

Hats off to the airline pilots who are making the effort to monitor the frequency and report distress beacons.

I am still livid that the stupid government requires me to install an ELT, and then they decided to quit monitoring it.